As portable electronic devices become more compact, and the number of functions performed by a given device increase, it has become a significant challenge to design a user interface that allows users to easily interact with a multifunction device. This challenge is particularly significant for handheld portable devices, which have much smaller screens than desktop or laptop computers. This situation is unfortunate because the user interface is the gateway through which users receive not only content but also responses to user actions or behaviors, including user attempts to access a device's features, tools, and functions. Some portable communication devices (e.g., mobile telephones, sometimes called mobile phones, cell phones, cellular telephones, and the like) have resorted to adding more pushbuttons, increasing the density of push buttons, overloading the functions of pushbuttons, or using complex menu systems to allow a user to access, store and manipulate data. These conventional user interfaces often result in complicated key sequences and menu hierarchies that must be memorized by the user.
Some portable electronic devices provide email capabilities in addition to other features, such as access to and display of online videos, Internet access, media player features, and cell phone capabilities. Prior to using these email capabilities a device must establish a connection to a designated email server that provides email services. A portable electronic device can connect to an email server in two ways: indirectly, via a web server with its own connection to the email server, or directly, via a SMTP connection. A device establishes a direct connection with an email server by specifying for that connection a port and security setting (both of which must be supported by the server). There are many possible combinations of port and security settings that can be defined for a given connection and each of these combinations is associated with a different level of security. Accordingly, it can be confusing for a user to define such settings and, given the number of choices, the user might select for the portable device a combination of settings that is less secure than another possible combination. Moreover, in some instances a prior established connection can become unavailable. In this situation a user would need to reestablish their email connection using a different combination of port and security settings. This can be confusing and result in a less than optimal configuration, for the same reason as the initial connection.
Accordingly, there is a need for a portable electronic device with email capabilities that enables optimal port and security settings to an email server be established with little or no user confusion. There is also a need for a portable electronic device that enables different combinations of port and security settings to be determined for a direct email connection when a connection to the email server cannot be established using prior port and security settings.